Lackluster Obama: Change Is Hard, Give Me More Time

It’s finally over. Obama hasn’t gotten any bump yet, but I’ve expected that to change. Now I’m not so sure for reasons discussed below. Either way, Team Romney is ready to “carpet bomb” battleground states with ads starting Friday. The last two hours of tonight’s proceedings were the Biden and Obama show, so let’s dig in:

Vice President Biden – Like Bill Clinton, Biden went too long. He veered back and forth from near-whispering to stentorian shouting. After offering a loving tribute to his family and accepting the Vice Presidential nomination, Biden praised his running mate and attacked Mitt Romney in similarly exaggerated terms. He said the Obama/Biden ticket is on a mission to move America from “doubt and downturn” to “promise and prosperity.” Whether he realized it or not, this was a tacit admission that we’re still in the former stage of that equation after four years of this administration’s stewardship. Things were really bad, so give us more time, he essentially pleaded — a recurring theme of the convention. But he also made this stark pronouncement about the US economy: “America has turned the corner!” This line was greeted with tepid applause. He said Obama has created 4.5 million jobs over 29 months, a paltry figure that still isn’t even quite correct. He thundered that America is “not in decline,” but many Americans are beginning to fear he’s wrong about that. Connecting with the folks, Biden recycled a debunked anecdote about the battle Barack Obama’s mother waged with her insurance company as she battled cancer. The word “literally” did not appear in Biden’s prepared remarks, but he literally ad-libbed it eight times, often using it incorrectly. He, er, literally lied about Medicare, but that’s par for the course. He regurgitated tired, misleading “equal pay” rhetoric. And he went to his favorite line about Bin Laden being dead and GM being alive under President Obama. GM still owes us tens of billions of dollars, but those statements are both true. Do they justify four more years of everything else?